


The Wain

by grayglube



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Jon Snow is not all right, Jon Snow the Wandering Crow, Maybe sorta a five in one fic, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-10-14 09:12:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10533384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: He wanders while following different stars than his fathers would have.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Arcturus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7434107) by [grayglube](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube). 



> Companion piece to Arcturus which is my post canon ten years later, basically Jon is not the man he used to be. Title is from the last fic where I mentioned other names for constellations.
> 
> Jon Snow = Jaehaerys III
> 
> Dreadfort = Lady's Keep (my little Sansa head canon on what she would rename it)

 

_White Harbor_

_After things settle he finds himself in the only true northern city with a port and harbor, whores and merchants, lords and poor men alike. It is not as cold as he’d expected it to be. He arrives by ship and leaves on foot._

 

When he was a green boy there was a woman, a girl with fire for hair who had told him girls would claw each other’s eyes out to get their skin against his.

 

He remembers her hair but her face is gone and her name is a thing that never was.

 

It is something of the past which seems beyond him, _before_ him more than it ever is behind him, for the only thing that is behind him is the dark that a woman with hair like fire tore him from because he was needed, because he was necessary.

 

A war has been won and he’s wondered since how necessary he truly was in the winning of it, in the survival of those around him.

 

He’s someplace close to the sea and all around him are people who have never held what has been so close to them as the past within their sight long enough to lose sleep over and make them grind their teeth.

 

The green-haired granddaughter of Lord Manderly has blue eyes that turn wet like the sea crashing outside the keep.

 

“You can come to my bed but I won’t wife you for it,” she says, her smile is sly but her breasts heave with each unsteady breath. His trencher is still full but so is her gown’s bodice, he aches in the same way he has been wandering, endlessly, aimlessly he wants and is always empty.

 

He has her and she leaves ashamed, maybe. He’s been too blunt with his words and he’s been told before that he can be brutish too, never unwanted but sometimes too _much_. He’s glad she’s left the way other women before her have left his chambers. They all leave silently. Some are full of guile too, some resentful, and still others are saddened by him and what he is, of what he might have always been becoming.

 

He can steal from the cold inside their warmth for a while but not every dawning has brought the quiet respite of a long indulging of what came the night before.

 

He’s known from ladies’ maids that not every woman is kind after the sun has risen and he can hardly complain for that.

 

Most women have known men who have never been kind at all.

 

Lord Manderly's granddaughter is not a kind woman, his shoulders stings from the bite of her nails, her ankles pulled tightly into his back and flanks have made them ache.

* * *

 

 

_Winterfell_

_The old halls are not as put back together as well as they should be. No ghosts linger but he already knows that there is no such thing. The dead sleep and do not wake and perhaps they dream but his own fading was only ever black. His brother never dreams, only wanders, like him. But, Bran goes far wider than he will ever manage._

 

His brother is King in the North and his sister is Wardeness, he hears quiet voices and all their admonishings of him. He wanders when he should be in his place. Some place, a place others must decide is his. His brother must govern and is too busy to mind his long absences or sudden arrivals, his sister simply does not care where he goes.

 

He can hear the springs trickling inside the walls when a girl raised to spear and poison in the mire of frogs and drifting castles comes upon him in the halls of the place where he was raised a bastard.

 

“Your brother needs an heir,” she says.

 

Her hair is curls and darkness, her teeth are not the green people say they should be.

 

“I’m older than he is, and he has three nephews,” he answers to her pursed mouth and her knife sharp eyes.

 

His sister has three sons and no husband, the wilding she calls her man is as red of hair as she and the sons of Sansa Redstark are named after the dead; Eddard, Robb, Jon.

 

But Bran is the last true Stark and Meera does not let him go past. He wonders if she will look at him when she speaks what she wants of him. They all seem to want something of him, his absence mostly. But, not her, not Bran.

 

“He won’t ask himself, he’s made it my choice. I told him and he still wouldn’t call you to him to ask.”

 

“Find another man to give you a babe my brother can name his heir.”

 

“Your brother will do the work of it,” and slowly, softly, when she should look away she only raises her chin and stares, “allow him that.”

 

He doesn’t scowl but in the dark he wonders if she thinks he is. Bran is less a man than he, not because of his limp legs but because he sees more than a man who has seen the dark and the dead. Bran is all men, all creatures, all things.

 

“He could have just done it. He’s a King, he needn’t ask.”

 

But, his brother’s wife is not just a Northerner, she is a strange creature from a place that seems a world further than the Wall did when he was still a boy. She slips to his side, he walks and she to keeps his slow place.

 

“You’re right. But, he told me all the same that I should ask you. He won’t. But, he is still a _man_. And, he needs an heir.”

 

In the dark he has seen things, he has seen a man whose blood was fire who went north to freeze, with a thousand eyes that could see the threads of the past and the future tearing itself free. Bran could live a thousand years for every one that was stolen from their kin, stuck in one spot, growing into the earth like the white limbs and pale roots of the Weirwood.

 

There is a woman who used to be a girl, who loves his brother, asking him for something he’s sworn to give because once he made her a fool’s promise.

 

_“You saved his life. If ever you are in want of something I will lend my hand to you in the taking of it Lady Reed.”_

“I will bear no sons,” he says in the dark.

 

“My children will be mine like your brother is mine and I am his. my husband is mine. So, who would my children be but my husband’s?”

 

He’s been inside of his wolf. His brother had been inside wolves too, and simple men, and dragons. They walk together, he and his brother's wife, it isn’t as if he does not know where they are walking to.

 

He spills seed and come some moons his brother has his heir.

 

He leaves Winterfell and Meera Reed hands him his reins, she does not thank him, in the dark he can almost remember the feel of her skin, a fortnight later the taste of her is gone and his dreams are black and depthless once more.

 

In his quiet wanderings he thinks he can hear his brother’s whisper in the wind, his thanks and his scorn.

* * *

 

 

_Karhold_

_It is the last hearth of the North before the ice of the Wall. It was given to a youngest son for valor, more than that it was given to a man who had killed other men, men who broke their oaths. He finds the current state of things to be the best of all he had done once that has lasted after his first death._

 

Her husband stares at him like the sight of him is something foul. It’s the look of an angry man, an envious one.

 

Jon Snow is free.

 

Alys Karstark is a Lady.

 

Sigorn lives in a keep, with a wife and a table of men that are half wilding and half Karstark.

 

And, it is not Alys Karstark walking the halls of Karhold at night, it’s her husband, restless like something caged.

 

And, it is not Alys Karstark that comes upon him with lips and teeth and rough hands. It isn’t the same as kissing a woman but it is not dissimilar.

 

Sigorn says he misses the life before the war, before climbing the Wall, before dragons and fire, and he curses the man who was and is again Jon Snow for what he has done to him by making him a lord, for the wife and the hold and the lands he’s been chained to.

 

But, it is Alys Karstark that comes upon them and it’s her that leads them both back to her bed like some gentle mother or quiet wild thing of the night.

* * *

 

_The Dreadfort_

_It took them a year of siege to claim the Dreadfort as her due. His once sister takes what is hers with an army of wildlings and men who swore oaths to her father and horses and steel and bannermen and killers she’s brought to her by beauty and courage and the force of her rage and the craving for blood even after the war was done._

 

The woman he called sister when they small lives in a castle whose stones have blackened over many long winters. Her heart might not have turned to such a clutched black thing in her hands, between her ribs, but there are none who truly know her by heart now.

 

She is beautiful and her hair is like fire and her skin, he knows, under her heavy gown is crossed with white lashes of scars left by a man who many remember as baser than a beast. She is beautiful and red and cold. There’s something that tugs on him, by the hand and by the cock, a lost thing, something from before he was pulled from knives and ice and nothing, something from before he crawled into it, weak and pitiful and bleeding lifeblood into the snow.

 

A girl with hair like fire, not so beautiful but born as fierce as his sister was forced to become.

 

He forgets sometimes which girl is the woman who lives now.

 

His sister calls a wilding her man, a man with hair like her own and a face almost as pretty. He remembers her man’s father, a friend who fought beside him and died and who was husband to bears.

 

Sansa Redstark has a man and three sons. But, she has no husband.

 

“It’s a long ride to wherever you go, Jon.”

 

But, he cannot stay, he will not stay.

 

Her eldest has hair like hers and the grey eyes of the North, her eyes are blue, her man's are green.

 

He’s stayed before in her castle, in the place she’s named again as something kinder than it deserves.

 

Her eldest is named after her father and the boy’s eyes are grey, like his grandfather’s she might say if any were to ask. They only look grey as the boy stands in a hall of black stone.

 

Sansa Redstark went South once, when she was a girl in the same way Jaehaerys, Third of His Name, went North, when he was still a bastard named Snow, when she was a maid with flowers in her hair.

 

They’ve both bleed in the cold. He’s been killed and he’s been pulled from his own death like a babe from its mother, she’d been bred for songs to sing of while being left for dogs to maul.

 

Once, he’s stayed in her castle. She’d given him ale in her own chambers and he’d known what she’d wanted of him. He’d called her by another’s forgotten name and she hadn’t even wept.

 

He’d known she was beautiful and in some cold, awful way she had pleased him more than anyone else had, like being stabbed by nameless blades in the dark. In the morning she’d dressed herself again and regarded him as formally as she always has since.

 

He’s sworn an oath.

 

_Bear no sons._

 

Her eldest son has climbed the wall twice and can play the harp as fine as Rhaegar Targaryean. In the sunlight his eyes are violet but he smiles instead of sulking and that helps to soften any comparson between them.

 

In another life they might have been a song together. Once they used to be children together.

* * *

 

_Bear Island_

_It is a place unlike any other, sea and land that is strong and vital. It is a place he would have liked Winterfell the be, once when he was lonely and a boy. Now, he is man and he is only alone._

 

 

He remembers her as a child, no less commanding now than she was then.

 

She is a woman of twenty, he thirty and one and she is the only woman who has not asked something of him, only given. She’s only known him as a King, called him a king, before he forsook such things as crown and castle of his own.

 

She drinks moon-tea in the mornings after they’ve lain together and he knows one day she will need an heir but it is far enough away to forget. They do not speak of where they have come from, only of spring, only of summer, only of how green things have become, again.

 

She’s a woman grown but she’s never been a girl. She’s never seen the white raven fly to announce winter’s end.

 

He carries the sword of her house and that’s near enough to a pledge in the godswood he can give. She does not call him her man, only King when he has put himself deep inside of her.

 

_Bear Island knows no King…_

He’d been a man who had never died then when she’d written words that filled him with such desperate yearning to be more than he was, to be other than himself, to be more. He'd been a man who'd been dead only once when she'd shouted the words to a full Hall of tired lords.

 

_...but the King in the North..._

 

But, he's never truly been a Stark just as she's never truly been a child and it no longer matters that they have not become what they have never been.

 

In Summer they are new to themselves.


End file.
